Moon and Finger 8 – The Present Past: Reading Hekigoto part 2
Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Orense Nicod.
The Present Past:
Reading Hekigoto’s “Until I Hit the Fly” Part II
Last week in part I we followed Hekigoto’s poem as it unsettled the question of what makes a haiku a haiku, shifting the focus from formal properties to function and the act of realization itself.
That shift leads to a further question: what happens to haiku tradition—and to time itself—once identity is understood in this way? Tradition, in this sense, is also a theory of time, and Hekigoto’s critique extends to its most embedded assumption: haiku’s relationship to seasonality.
Part 3 Swatting the Kigo
Summer in the Japanese seasonal imagination is not a simple thing. It is the season of maximum vitality — of green surging up unstoppably, of life at its most forceful and abundant. And it is simultaneously the season of fastest decay, where the boundary between flourishing and decomposition is at its thinnest. The fly lives exactly at that threshold. It is a summer creature not merely because it appears in warm weather but because it is drawn to the place where vitality is tipping into its opposite — the agent and symptom of decomposition, present wherever something is dying. Bashō’s summer grass growing over the ruins of Hiraizumi — the glory that has become nothing but green — is the same ambivalence rendered in a different key. Summer in haiku is always, in part, elegy.
The fly at the threshold of vitality and decay is an apt figure for the haiku tradition Hekigoto inherited — a form of extraordinary richness that had begun, in his view, to show signs of the other kind of summer. The season that generates and the season that decomposes are not opposites. They are the same season, seen from different angles. Hekigoto believed the tradition had tipped from one to the other — not through failure but through success, through the very accumulation of conventions that had made haiku recognisable and teachable and reproducible. What had flourished had begun to rot at its edges. Shinkeiko was not a rejection of that richness. It was an attempt to turn the fly-swatter on the decay.
Shinkeiko — new tendency haiku — was not a clean break with tradition. Hekigoto abandoned the on count and eventually the kireji, but he retained the kigo, and retained it deliberately. He was skeptical of those within his own movement who wanted to abandon seasonal reference altogether — Ōgiwara Seisensui went that far, Hekigoto did not.
His diagnosis of haiku’s illness was not the kigo itself but what the establishment had done to it — draining the living seasonal encounter from the word until only the approved form remained. He saw the haiku world he had inherited as turning increasingly inward, repeating established tastes and responses rather than renewing its contact with lived experience. The saijiki had made the kigo what the fly-swatter in the drawer is: the form without the function, the name held in reserve.
This is why he coined kidai 季題 — seasonal topic — in 1907. Kigo points to the word, kidai points to the subject, the living relation to season that the word had forgotten how to hold. The kigo worth keeping was the one that still did what a kigo does. Seasonality, in this sense, was not a catalogue of terms but a quality of attention — being present to the season rather than naming it correctly.
Read this way, the fly-swatter poem becomes not merely an expression of what kidai was reaching toward but a direct comment on kigo itself.
The poem contains two established summer kigo — hae (fly) and haetataki (fly-swatter). Within the saijiki, the fly-swatter already exists as a recognised seasonal word before any actual swatting occurs. Its seasonal identity is guaranteed in advance by literary convention.
Hekigoto’s poem refuses this guarantee.
“Until I hit the fly, the fly-swatter did not exist.”
The claim is no longer merely ontological but seasonal. Before the act, the fly-swatter had no seasonal existence. The kigo is not validated by classification but by encounter. Seasonal meaning does not precede the experience; it emerges from it.
The saijiki had made the kigo into a symbol detached from the lived reality it once arose from. Hekigoto reverses this order. The season must happen before the word can truly exist.
In Issa, the fly is already charged with moral and existential weight. It rubs its hands and feet in supplication, a creature poised at the threshold of life and death. Issa intercedes on its behalf — not sentimentally, but with the quiet conviction of a Buddhist sensibility in which this small life and human life share the same fragility. The kigo does its classical work here: summer heat, domestic proximity, impermanence, compassion, the thin membrane between being and non-being. The fly becomes a character. Seasonal recurrence opens onto something larger than itself.
Hekigoto swats without hesitation. Past tense, decisive, stripped of Issa’s hesitation or tenderness. In that act, he also displaces the fly’s hon’i — the accumulated literary associations and aura carried by the insect in haiku tradition. What in Issa becomes a vehicle for compassion is here reduced to interruption: a catalyst, not a character.
The poem’s attention then shifts away from the fly, and even from the act of swatting, toward the instrument itself — and not simply its presence, but the question of whether it was ever there at all.
Hekigoto uses kigo to anchor the poem in the living season. But the act turns on that anchor. Seasonal time is invoked, then quietly set aside — a frame within which the philosophical claim takes over.
Nakarishi — had no existence — asks the same question of the kigo that it asks of the fly-swatter. The kigo lives in the eternal present of seasonal recurrence, connecting this summer to all summers, this fly to the accumulated tradition of summer flies. But the accomplished past interrupts that continuity. The fly-swatter did not exist and then it did: a singular, unrepeatable event.
Seasonal recurrence is a revolving door. The completed act is a one-way door. You cannot pass through both at once.
What remains after the philosophy has passed through the summer afternoon is not the literary summer but the season itself — stripped of its literary clothing, returned to its bare reality. Not the fly of tradition, tender and supplicant, but a fly. Not the summer of all summers, weighted with accumulated feeling, but this summer afternoon: specific, unrepeatable.
The kigo grounds the philosophy. The philosophy, in turn, exposes the limits of that grounding. What remains is simpler and stranger — closer to an actual summer afternoon than the literary summer ever was.
This is what kidai was always reaching for: not the approved word that stands in for the season, but the actual encounter with it. Hekigoto uses kigo to anchor the poem in the world, and then uses the poem to return the word to that world — less inherited, more immediate.
This drift of attention connects to what Hekigoto theorised as muchūshinron, the principle of non-centrality. Where classical haiku tends to organise itself around a fixed focal point — the dominant image, the kigo, the moment of perception that anchors everything else — Hekigoto resists this. The poem should not have a stable centre. Meaning should arise from the movement between elements, not from the dominance of any one of them.
The fly-swatter poem enacts this principle: the centre drifts. It begins with the fly — summer kigo, Issa’s shadow, the classical tradition of the insect at the threshold of vitality and decay. Then it shifts to the fly-swatter — the two kigo together making a summer scene, a lived seasonal world rather than a literary one, the classical associations of the fly giving way to the functional object that will define itself through use. Then it shifts again to the ontological question: what makes a thing what it is, what constitutes existence, what the act brings into being. Then further still, toward the metapoetic dimension: what makes a haiku a haiku, what distinguishes the poem that catches the moment from the one that merely resembles one. And beyond that, if the reader follows the logic where it leads — toward their own existence, their own identity, the question of what any of us are before the acts that make us what we are.
Each element displaces the previous one. By the end the poem no longer possesses a fixed centre — or rather, its centre lies in the displacement itself, in the chain reaction the swat initiates and cannot arrest.
In this sense, Muchūshinron is function over form applied to the poem’s own structure. The fly-swatter poem is not an image arranged for contemplation but a sequence of shifts the reader must follow. Not a centre to locate, but an act to complete. A centred poem revolves around what it contains; a non-centred poem revolves around what it does.
Part 4 The Living Past
If haiku’s identity lies not in what it contains but in what it does, then the old objection to past tense haiku begins to look less secure. The assumption behind that objection is rarely stated outright, but it governs much of the tradition’s thinking about presence: that pastness and immediacy are opposites, that the completed act can only ever be reported rather than lived. The present tense appears immediate, alive, unfolding before the reader. The past tense appears completed, sealed off, already gone. One seems to enact experience while the other merely reports it.
But experience does not work this way. The present is never isolated from the past that shapes it or the future it moves toward. Memory, consequence, recognition, grief, realization — the very structures of human experience — require temporal depth. A consciousness trapped in a pure present would not be awakened but impoverished. Change requires a before, and the pure present has none.
The present tense in haiku has often functioned as a shorthand for immediacy, but immediacy and present tense are not identical things. A haiku can inhabit the grammatical present and still fail to become present in experience. It can describe vividly and remain inert. It can observe beautifully and never become alive.
What matters is not the tense of the verbs but whether the poem functions as an utterance — whether it recreates an experience in the living present of reading.
Whatever their origins, the formal elements of haiku converged toward a common function — sustaining immediacy against the pull of recollection, explanation, and static description. Kireji, seasonal recurrence, compression, cut — these are not decorative conventions. They are techniques that came to serve presence, ways of staying alive on the page. Haiku does not simply invite presence. It works to sustain it.
But none of these devices guarantees life. They are methods, not essences. The history of haiku is filled with poems possessing every orthodox feature and yet remaining curiously dead on the page — formally correct but lifeless. Shape alone cannot preserve immediacy.
Hekigoto’s fly-swatter poem is precisely this problem, taken further. The accomplished past is not incidental to the poem’s meaning but the condition of it. The fly-swatter can only come into existence retrospectively, after the act that constitutes it has already occurred. Function reveals itself in time. The present of the poem therefore depends upon the completedness of the act.
Furthermore Hekigoto’s use of the past tense is even more radical than it first appears. He does not just use the past tense, he does so while discarding several of the formal devices haiku uses to stay present. The poem lacks kireji. It abandons the full seventeen on. It permits philosophical abstraction where orthodox haiku expected imagistic immediacy. And its accomplished past undermines the thread through which the kigo would normally pull the poem back into seasonal recurrence. Hekigoto removes all the safeguards at once.
Ordinarily these absences would increase the danger of the poem collapsing into statement or abstraction. The usual supports are gone. Nothing corrals the poem back toward presence. And this cannot be separated from the poem’s argument. A poem that insists a thing becomes what it is only through the act, must itself refuse to rely on form alone to constitute its presence. The risk is the proof.
And paradoxically, this is what restores presence to full force. When presence is guaranteed by formal apparatus, it becomes aestheticized — a reliable effect, something the reader can anticipate and receive without risk. It arrives pre-packaged. The now of the poem is a known quantity, a structural certainty, and certainty, however pleasurable, is not aliveness. It can become décor.
When the guarantee is removed, presence becomes an event again. Something that happens, or doesn’t, in real time. The reader cannot rely on the form to deliver it. They must generate it themselves, in the gap between the completed act and the question it opens. And a presence that has to be generated rather than received is a presence that is genuinely contingent — which is to say, genuinely present.
Hekigoto does not weaken haiku’s presentness. He removes its insurance policy. And in doing so he restores to presence the one quality that aestheticization had taken from it: the possibility of failure. But why here, why now, why this poet at this moment? This is not simply an aesthetic choice. The insurance policy became inadequate because the experience of time the form was built around had shifted.
This is why the poem matters historically as well as philosophically. It does not merely reject convention. It exposes what the conventions were trying to accomplish in the first place — not the preservation of a form, but the survival of presence itself. And to understand what Hekigoto is exposing, we need to understand what kind of presence the tradition was built around.
Seasonal time is cyclical. It returns. The same flowers bloom, the same insects appear, the same heat settles over the same afternoons. Classical haiku is deeply shaped by this recurrent temporality. The kigo situates the present moment within a larger continuity that precedes and outlasts the individual poet.
But modernity introduces another experience of time: historical, irreversible, event-driven. Japan’s Meiji transformation was among the most compressed and disorienting in history — feudal structures dissolved within a generation, Western technology and institutional forms absorbed at speed, a country remade almost beyond recognition in the space of decades. The past did not recede gradually. It was severed. A poet standing at the intersection of two centuries felt this not as abstract process but as the texture of daily life — the world his teachers had known was gone, and the world replacing it moved too fast for the seasons to absorb.
This is not only a Japanese story. Wherever modernity arrives it changes the experience of time. Seasonal recurrence does not disappear, but it no longer goes unquestioned. Cyclical time begins to share the stage with historical time — sequential, linear, ruptural. The kigo belongs primarily to one experience of time. The accomplished past belongs to another. What Hekigoto registered in a summer room with a dead fly was not merely a philosophical observation about fly-swatters. It was a shift in the emphasis of our way of being in time — one that haiku, if it remained faithful to the present, could no longer refuse to acknowledge.
Hekigoto’s accomplished past belongs to this new temporal pressure. The swat is not recurrence but rupture. The fly-swatter did not exist and then it did. A threshold has been crossed. The event cannot be folded back into seasonal continuity without remainder.
And yet the poem remains unmistakably haiku.
That fact matters. Because it reveals that haiku was never truly confined to the eternal present at all. The form always contained a tension between recurrence and singularity, between the universal and the unrepeatable, between the season that returns and the instant that never can. Hekigoto does not invent this tension. He exposes it.
This is why the past in haiku is not dead time. The past remains active within experience, shaping the present from inside it. The accomplished act does not close the poem; it opens it. The reader encounters not a preserved moment but a living relation between what has happened and what is still becoming visible because it happened.
The past is not foreign to haiku presence. It is one of the ways presence becomes perceptible at all.
Hekigoto understood this. Conventions designed to preserve immediacy can themselves become routinized into simulations of immediacy. Fidelity to the present sometimes requires breaking from the forms that once carried it. Not because tradition is false, but because living experience changes, and haiku changes with it. The task is not to preserve the appearance of immediacy. It is to preserve immediacy itself.
Conclusion:
Upon Hekigoto’s death in 1937, his friend and rival Takahama Kyoshi wrote this memorial haiku, prefacing it: “Hekigoto and I were close friends and often argued.”
たとふれば独楽のはじける如くなり
tatoureba koma no hajikeru gotoku nari
Like two spinning tops
We burst away
At the slightest touch
Translation by Nagayama Aya
As the two most prominent students of Masaoka Shiki, the split between Hekigoto and Kyoshi did not end with either of them. It generated the two halves of the haiku world that still exist today — Dentō, the traditional school, and Gendai, the modern. Two tops, struck apart by the same collision, still spinning. And the stakes of that split extend further than Japan, further than the Meiji haiku world, further than the quarrel between two men who had learned the form from the same teacher. They extend to every poet who has tried to write haiku in a language that cannot replicate the kigo system, cannot do what kireji do, cannot count on.
If Kyoshi’s answer is correct — if haiku is defined by its inherited formal apparatus, by the shape that makes it immediately recognisable as haiku within the tradition — then English language haiku (ELH) is by definition something less than haiku. A translation of a form it can never fully reach. A mourning process for a tradition it cannot inherit.
Hekigoto’s answer says otherwise. If the poem exists as a haiku not because it possesses the correct formal properties but because it does what haiku does then the language is not the barrier. The moment of contact between a consciousness and the world, rendered with enough precision and enough compression to recreate that contact in the reader: that is the barrier, and that threshold is the same in every language.
Yet in practice ELH does not resolve the split between Kyoshi and Hekigoto. It lives inside it — where the desire to honour the tradition and the need to make the poem work pull in different directions without resolution. That friction is not a problem ELH solves. It is the ground ELH works from.
Two tops, still in contact, still spinning.
—Orense Nicod
Don’t forget to TAKE THIS WEEK’S POLL.
Next Tuesday, Keith begins his three-part exploration, The Past Is Not a Foreign Country.
Before that Chorus 2 will appear on Saturday. If you haven’t already, please take part in the polls (poll 1 and poll 2). Voting closes on Thursday, and your responses will help shape the discussion.
As always your responses, reactions, questions and contradictions are welcome in the comments.
Kawahigashi Hekigoto (1873–1937) was, together with Takahama Kyoshi, one of the most prominent students of Masaoka Shiki and a central figure in the transformation of modern haiku. Born in Matsuyama, like Shiki, he was the son of a Confucian scholar and developed wide-ranging interests beyond poetry, including calligraphy, Noh, journalism, literary criticism, and travel. After Shiki’s death in 1902, Hekigoto succeeded him as editor of the haiku section of the newspaper Nihon and briefly became one of the most influential voices in the haiku world.
As the leading figure of the shinkeikō (“new tendency”) movement, Hekigoto pushed Shiki’s reforms further, questioning inherited formal restrictions and experimenting with freer approaches to haiku. He abandoned strict adherence to the seventeen-on structure, but retained the kigo, which he regarded as an essential connection between haiku and the living seasonal world. His students, including Ōgiwara Seisensui, later moved toward even more radical experiments, including haiku without seasonal reference, while Kyoshi came to champion a renewed traditionalism. Hekigoto’s position remained between these two directions: a reformer seeking renewal without severing haiku’s connection to tradition. For more
At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 5 questions).
It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.
Periodic issues titled Chorus will return to what the polls have gathered — not to tally verdicts but to examine what the pattern of responses reveals. Where readers converge is interesting. Where they diverge is often more so. The more poets who participate the richer the picture.
Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:
Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.
Introducing the hosts:
Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.
Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).
A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.
Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group. Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.
Comments: further discussion is invited below. Comments will close when this post is automatically archived.
THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.
If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator (the host of this post) or the President here.
Comments (51)
Comments are closed.
This is a response, partial and impulsive and parallel to but not reactive I don’t think, to Orense’s post from July 23, 2026 at 5:28 a.m. beginning–
Keith and Peter, I think this question . . .
(And once again, a plea to make this feature more easily navigable. It is frustrating having to sift through so much to get to a new post.)
“Is haiku an essence recognized by readers or an intentional participation in a tradition? They correspond to different modes of existence.”
Or perhaps they correspond to different modes of perception and expectation, or, to use a harsh word—conditioning. But basically, as a reader approaches what they believe to be a haiku, perhaps both happen at the same time: tradition informs what is taken to be the essence, and vice versa.
If a poem appears in *Modern Haiku*, it will be received as a haiku, and its essence will be “activated” by that assumption. If a poem that looks like a haiku appears in *NOON: Journal of the Short Poem*, adjacent to a poem 11 lines long, there may be some doubt. There may even be a fresh reading of the poem, at least until it is recognized as or believed to be haiku. I like the idea that a haiku could be presented in such a way or in such a place as to create uncertainty about what it is, where things like “tradition” do not immediately register.
Of course, one may choose to read a haiku as a haiku with everything one knows about haiku in play, and thereby participate in the tradition, and feel a member of a community—and derive a great deal of pleasure from this. This is not a strong impulse for me.
As I have said elsewhere, there was a time when one first encountered haiku, when one knew nothing about it. One read it as something new and fresh, and whatever it was that struck one about it was perhaps the “essence” of haiku. Of course, “essence” is something that exists between the poem and the reader, and it will be different to some degree for each. And probably indefinable, ineffable even.
It is likely that this first essential encounter will not occur again, or at least not in the same way or to the same depth. Which may account for the complaint about stagnation in haiku, which for me, to put it rather infelicitously, means that poem after poem announces itself as “haiku.”
Still, every now and then an extraordinary piece appears that renews one’s faith. It may be that such pieces occur more often than I think, but are drowned out or dulled by the beating of 1000 butterfly wings on the windowpane, leaving a powdery film through which everything looks like a dead butterfly.
Which is why I advocate for haiku, not even named as such, to appear among other poems, something Philip Rowland has written about with compelling clarity.
I may be in conversation with Bashō and friends, but I am also in conversation with aphorists, Antonio Machado, Olivia Dresher, Charles Simic, Tomas Tranströmer, E. Dickinson . . . and if this conversation leads me to something other than what looks like haiku, I’m fine with that.
But, to be honest, I do often sit down to write things that seem to come from the body/soul memory of my first “essential” encounter with what was named “haiku”—things that I hope will have a particular/peculiar quality which might elicit the response: “I may not know what this is, but it *is*.”
Peter, I find a lot to agree with here, especially your description of that first encounter — before we have a framework for explaining why something affects us. That moment is real, and I think you are right that it is often difficult to define, perhaps even ineffable.
Where I would push back is on the idea that this first encounter carries a kind of authenticity that later encounters cannot recover. The freshness you describe might be the quality of any first encounter — with a novel, a piece of music, a new art form. But we do not usually assume that the novice’s response is therefore the deepest possible one. The first encounter gives us an intuition. Later encounters do not necessarily move us away from that intuition; they can test it, complicate it, and deepen it.
Your own account of stagnation — poem after poem announcing itself as “haiku,” a thousand butterfly wings dulling the impact until “everything looks like a dead butterfly” — is itself evidence that repetition can flatten as easily as depth can accumulate. I would say the danger you describe is real, but it is a danger of habituation, not of knowledge itself. Those are different things.
On your Modern Haiku / NOON example: I think you are right that context activates or suppresses the assumption of “haiku,” and that this changes the reading. But when a poem appears outside the expected frame and creates that productive uncertainty, is the reader really encountering it without tradition? Or are they encountering it against the tradition they already carry? The absence of a frame is only meaningful because the reader knows what the frame usually is.
This is also why I think form cannot simply be separated from meaning. A poem written within a tradition is not just a poem with a label attached afterward. The tradition is part of the medium itself.
This makes me think of Apollinaire’s “Nuit rhénane” (“Rhenish Night”). It works for a reader who knows nothing about its formal background — the imagery is powerful, the atmosphere is striking, and the poem succeeds as an immediate encounter. But it is also a broken sonnet. A reader familiar with the form feels the poem moving toward the expected completion of the fourteenth line, and instead that line never arrives. The poet’s glass (verre) breaks with a peal of laughter, echoing vers, the line of poetry itself.
The point is not that formal knowledge gives us a different interpretation, but that it deepens the one we already have. The missing line is not merely a technical irregularity; it reveals the poem’s central gesture: an experience of fullness that cannot quite be contained by the form meant to contain it.
Nuit rhénane is an unusually perfect example because the relationship between form and meaning is so explicit. Not all formal poetry engages with its form this deeply, but it reveals the possibilities of what form can do. Form is not simply a container into which meaning is poured. In the best poetry, form and meaning are not separate things.
I think this applies to haiku as well. A reader does not need to know the history of haiku, the role of kigo, or the conventions of the cut in order to have a genuine encounter with a poem. The poem must work at that level. But the reader who knows the tradition is not merely bringing external information to the poem; they are perceiving dimensions that belong to the poem’s participation in that tradition.
Haiku cannot really be separated from its form. The cut, juxtaposition, seasonal reference, and relationship between the particular moment and the larger natural world are not techniques added afterward. They express a way of perceiving. The form itself says something about how the world reveals itself: not always through explanation or continuity, but through moments of relation, separation, and sudden recognition.
This is why I hesitate to see tradition primarily as something that distances us from the poem. Tradition can certainly become restrictive when it hardens into expectation, but that is not the same as tradition itself being an obstacle. If a poem belongs to a tradition, that relationship is not merely an external frame placed around it; it is part of the field of meaning in which the poem exists.
The best haiku should work for someone who knows nothing about the genre and also for someone who has spent years reading Bashō, Issa, Buson, Chiyo-ni, Shiki, Hekigoto, and others. These are not competing encounters. The first reader experiences the immediacy of the moment; the experienced reader also perceives the larger field of relations in which that moment exists.
I also appreciate your point that you are not only in conversation with Bashō and the haiku tradition, but also with poets from other traditions. That is entirely natural. No living form exists in isolation. ELH is necessarily in conversation with English-language poetry at large, just as Japanese haiku has always been in conversation with Chinese poetry and, later, with other literary movements.
Tradition has always accommodated dialogue. When we call a poem haiku, we are not claiming that it has only one ancestry. We are recognizing a particular field of relations — one that has always been dynamic.
Tradition is not a museum preserving fixed objects; it is a living conversation. Perhaps the real question is not whether tradition distances us from the first encounter, but whether the tradition has been absorbed deeply enough that it no longer feels like an external framework. It becomes intuition, taste, and perception.
I see tradition as neither a cage nor a pure essence behind the poem; but as the living field that makes certain poetic possibilities available.
Orense, as expected there is a lot here. I will take some time to respond, though I’m not sure how that will work as a new
edition of M&F will appear tomorrow. Overall, I would say that I think there is probably not much disagreement between us,
or perhaps it is more a matter of differences of approach. Or even things like comfort levels– I respect tradition, e.g., but look at it with suspicion.
Peter, there’s no problem with reintroducing substantive comment on a subject that’s cropped up in discussion of a prior Moon and Finger post and indicates continuation. It might be good if the author gives the comment a ‘keyword’ header to help people search for subsequent comments using their browser’s ‘find’ facility, and starts with a brief summary of the past discussion to reorient readers?
Dave Russo is considering how comments might be made a little easier to navigate, but options are limited within the THF WordPress CMS and would have to suit all features and their hosts. We don’t have a separate Forum now with its facility to start separate threads.
Clips on Hekigotõ that may be of interest in the history of squabbling schools of haiku:
“According to Hekigoto, it was necessary to devote oneself to objective imagery, but, in contrast to Shiki’s impressionism, which almost any poet could imitate, Hekigoto’s was one which was “rich in subjective taste.” Hence, the poet is to “look at nature through the window of his own senses and perceptions,” and his purpose is to express “a taste higher than for nature alone.” For the Shinkeiko movement, Hekigoto took the following for a motto: “a dynamic representation depending on an awakened individuality.” The tendency in Hekigotõ was to progress from reality to symbolism, from declarative to more suggestive statements. It was Osuga Otsuji who first used the term shin-keiko to describe the new style. This came in an article published in the January-February, 1908, number of Akane and entitled “Haikukai no shin-keiko (“New tendencies in the world of haiku.”) Speaking of Hekigotõ, Kitani Rikka, and Hiroe Yaezakura, Otsuji declared that “by pointing out a special characteristic they cause the actuality to appear dimly; consequently, the range of association of ideas becomes wider and more free.” Agreeing with Otsuji, Hekigoto tried to cut himself off from every association of idea connected with the seasons of the year, and worked toward the presentation of the individual characteristics of his subject matter. A consciously subjective and symbolistic style was thus born which also received the influence of naturalistic thought. Illustrating the new type of haiku is Nihon haikushõ daiisshu (A selection of Japanese haiku, number one), edited by Hekigotõ and containing the poems of Otsuji, Rikka, and Anzai Okaishi. The newer style agreed with “the movements of the poet’s spirit” and “the special customs of his native province.” Toward the end of 1910 many of the poets began to apply what they called muchushinron, “the theory of centerlessness.” According to this theory, the haiku was simply a one-line poem in seventeen syllables. In the older haiku, the abstract feelings associated with the seasons had been illustrated by natural scenes. Now, by beginning with an accurate description of a natural scene, the attempt was made to suggest the appropriate abstract feeling connected with it.
….
“In the magazine Kaiko, named after a kind of orange and first published in 1915, Hekigoto, who had by then parted company with Seisensui and was soon to break with Otsuji, agreed with the trend of the times in giving a heavier emphasis to human personalities than to nature. Although at first Hekigoto still composed poems of fixed form, by 1916 and 1917 he too began to depart from the 5-7-5 form, and thereafter observed only the rule of referring to the seasons, which he held to be at the very core of haiku. Gradually it became almost impossible for many of the poets to express themselves in ways other than a free formlessness. An individualistic realism was in the air. Among the poets of the past, it was the warmly human Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) who was now given the greatest attention.
…..
“In the period following World War I, Seisensui again called for a departure from the regular 5-7-5 form. Aro, however, opposed him when he declared himself in favor of a return to the haiku of Basho. Here he agreed with Otsuji, who had died in 1920. Still opposing the classical and traditional poets and espousing a free verse form for the haiku was Hekigoto, who began publishing the journals Heki (Green) and Sanmai (Absorption) upon his return from foreign travel in 1923. In the latter he even gave up the term haiku for his poems, which he began to call tanshi or “short poems.” In his essays he declared that poetry should not be limited to the stimulation of the senses, but should be “the manifestation of the eternal qualities rooted in man’s life.” Through his efforts haiku began to reflect the personal lives of its poets. Despite his impatience he served as a touchstone for the modern haiku. ”
(Quotes are from Japanese Literature of the Showa Period: a guide to Japanese reference and research materials; Joseph K. Yamagiwa, University of Michigan Press, 1959)
Comment: Hekigotõ’s “the poet is to “look at nature through the window of his own senses and perceptions,” does not seem that different from Shiki in Haikai Taiyõ. Hekigotõ’s regard for season as essential differs from Shiki, it seems to me, only in that the accumulated classical baggage of “hon’i” is regarded as more of an encumbrance than an asset. And as we have noted from Bashõ’s classic frog jumping into a pond instead of singing, and his classic bush warbler crapping on the ceremonial rice-cakes likewise, Hekigotõ’s swatting of the classic fly was not exactly a new thought. Just two centuries later. What goes around, comes around.
I find the history of squabbling schools, which continues and also finds reflection in ELH, to be increasingly tiresome: for there is something in what they all say. Something to be drawn from all of them. But as in academia, poets do love to ‘make a name’ by dispute and difference. It’s a useful ‘score’ to name a ‘movement,’ acquire disciples, accumulate publicity. And it provides continuing fodder for doctoral theses.
heart attack
two poets fighting
in a sack
yet
all poets agree
that their own verse
is poetry
There’s a famous haiku by a woman haiku poet about a sack and a foal, and another about a ballerina, and I can’t recall it now alas. So instead here’s one about a foal being born at midnight becoming Christmas Day morning. A brief cold two hours starting Christmas Eve in Queensland, Australia where I did horse agistment pro bono at the farm rental.
.
a sack as if a foal’s unfolding past midnight to dimming stars
Alan Summers
uncurated
.
My suggestion of a name was disallowed as it seemed too poetic and not manly enough, and it was bad enough I discovered the name Faraway Farm on an old utilities bill!
Allegedly about 90 to 93 percent of a human body’s mass is star material, meaning elements forged inside stars like carbon, oxygen, and iron. The remaining 7 to 10 percent is mostly hydrogen formed during the Big Bang.
I would hesitate to say some of us hold 90 to 93 percent of hot air or 7 to 10 percent. We are all stardust and we deserve the freedom of being a poet even if commentators decry us of that.
Alan Ziggy Summers
Love Faraway Farm and its foal, Ziggy!
Alas, it is me who is a secret Ziggy, I wanted to call the foal Starlight!
The farmer although he’d use the Trans-Siberian Railway regularly, did not like soft names.
Keith, I’ve been trying to parse the differences between Shiki’s “subjectivism” and Hekigotō’s “personality” myself. Here’s what I’m piecing together so far:
Prior to Shiki, haiku/hokku were written to embed the reader into the hon’i-Now dynamic. For example, haiku about mandarin orange blossoms were crafted so as to invoke IN THE READER a sense of memory and nostalgia (hon’i). Essentially the haiku said “This is what you, the reader, should feel.” The purpose of writing was Reader-oriented.
Shiki’s revolt into the realm of “subjectivism” was a turn toward a haiku whose purpose is Writer-Oriented. Shiki’s “subjectivism” is a /general/ expression of subjective experience of poet, through of traditional hon’i. Essentially, the haiku said, “This is how A poet feels.” Shiki was involved with how A haiku poet (as a general personality-type) SHOULD (but a loose “should”) feel towards the world and the art of haiku.
Hekigotō’s development of Shiki’s GENERAL subjectivity was to distill the general down to a SPECIFIC subjectivity. Essentially, the haiku said, “This is how THIS poet feels.” Hekigotō was involved with how a SPECIFIC poet ACTUALLY feels towards the world and the art of haiku (and thus is able to remove some of the general/genre limitations that THIS SPECIFIC poet feels are in the way of haiku-expression).
At least that’s the tinkering machine my understanding is putting the together as it stands at this moment.
Adam: That seems to me to be plausible tinkering. Some fieldwork on later verses, haiku or tanshi as they may be, by Hekigotõ and his school may be indicated. If only I was a younger man and had the time. I have some in my files though, somewhere. I don’t recall them as being notably subjective (not as subjective as Issa, say). Several pretty ‘detached.’ Also a statement he made in the first issue of Sanmai, I believe, that you will like:
「生命の流轉は、藝術の流轉を意味する。」
Seimei no ruten wa, geijutsu no ruten o imi suru
“The flux of life signifies the flux of art.”
Keith,
“I find the history of squabbling schools, which continues and also finds reflection in ELH, to be increasingly tiresome: for there is something in what they all say. Something to be drawn from all of them. But as in academia, poets do love to ‘make a name’ by dispute and difference. It’s a useful ‘score’ to name a ‘movement,’ acquire disciples, accumulate publicity. And it provides continuing fodder for doctoral theses.”
Ha! Personally, I love the squabbling because “there is something in what they all say”!
I’m not a walk-through-the-woods-with-a-Zen-empty-mind to try to feel or experience the essence of the Thing (I don’t even think that’s possible). I’m a walk-through-the-woods-with-my-mind-full-of-seething-oppossing-ideas that flop out as hybrid creatures in language creating/perceiving “Things.”
Life imitates Art, sorta fella.
Adam, just to be clear: please do not think for a moment that I wander through the pine forest trying to become a pine! Neither would I be wedded to the Wildean notion that life imitates art. I prefer the other end of the telescope. And note the amusing Oscar’s doubt: “Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”
On squabbling, more ancient wisdom a couple of hundred years BCE:
“If there were not the views of another, I should not have mine…..Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly. Great indeed is the disorder produced in the world by the love of knowledge. …The plain and honest-minded people are neglected, and the plausible representations of restless spirits received with pleasure; and pleasure taken in ideas garrulously expressed. It is this garrulity of speech which puts the world in disorder.”
It is fun, though, being a restless spirit.
I’ll paste my answer to John’s comment from last week’s Part I, because I think it addresses some of the questions raised this week.
John Hamley writes:
“Where does the past end and the present begin? Could one just as well say that a flyswatter becomes a flyswatter when it becomes possible for someone to swat flies with it?
At edges things tend to get fuzzy. Trying to make firm definitions there can lead to nonsense. Or should I tell God that if he created us, he must have done it before he himself came into existence?”
I answered:
Thank you, John. I think the question of where the past ends and the present begins is exactly the kind of question the poem is asking. But I would push back on the idea that attending to such distinctions necessarily leads to nonsense.
There are many kinds of existence: physical, potential, conceptual, functional, experiential, and so on. Hekigoto is not claiming that the fly-swatter was physically absent before the act. He is focusing on a different kind of existence: the moment when something is realized as what it is through an encounter.
Your example—that a fly-swatter becomes a fly-swatter when it becomes possible to swat flies with it—places the emphasis on potentiality. Hekigoto places it on realization. Those are different philosophical positions, not simply a matter of one being precise and the other confused.
In fact, identifying identity with potentiality also creates difficult consequences. If capacity alone is enough to determine identity, then one could argue that every human being is already a murderer because every human possesses the capacity to kill. We usually resist that because we distinguish between what is possible and what has become actual.
What is fascinating is that this question is already embedded in the scene itself, as Richard Straw remarks. Hekigoto swats the fly where Issa has mercy. The fly is not just a device for a philosophical example; it carries the weight of a living creature. Before the swat, the fly is potentially dead. After the swat, it is dead. Something comes into being, and something passes away.
The poem is not trying to eliminate the fuzziness at the edges. It is asking us to look at one particular threshold: the moment when possibility becomes realization, and what that moment reveals.
And this threshold is not an arbitrary one chosen simply because it raises interesting philosophical questions. It is the site of a practical problem Hekigoto was confronting as a haiku poet.
In other words, I don’t think Hekigoto is asserting a universal theory of existence; instead, he is identifying the mode of existence that matters for the poetic and experiential problem he was working through.
““Until I hit the fly, the fly-swatter did not exist.” Doesn’t make sense to me.
“Before the act, the fly-swatter had no seasonal existence.” “Seasonal existence .” ???
Do we say:
“Before she put her bikini on, there was no bikini ? (or ” her bikini had no seasonal existence before she put it on.”?
The analogue would be “before my (3d) bits were covered, there was no bikini”. We are naming a thing after its function even if it was intended for another use.
Thank you, Simon. That’s a fair way to put it, and I think it’s compatible with what I’m arguing rather than a rival account.
Naming-after-function is one linguistic symptom of the larger point: the identity we assign to an object often tracks what it does, not only what it was designed or intended for. The fly-swatter is fly-swatter-shaped before the swat, but the full force of the name emerges through the encounter in which its function is realized.
Where I would push a little further than pure naming is that the poem is not only doing lexical work — deciding what to call the thing. It uses that naming shift to stage a broader question about realization: how objects, kigo, and perhaps even poems themselves come into full presence through encounter rather than existing only as prior classifications.
But you’re right that at the most basic level, it starts exactly where you’re pointing: we often name things after what they do, and that relationship between function and identity is precisely what makes Hekigoto’s example so compelling.
Thank you, Lorin. I reposted my exchange with John from last week’s part I above because I think it answers your first objection.
As to the question you raise about “seasonal existence,” I should clarify that I do not mean seasonal existence in a general sense. I mean existence within the seasonal world of haiku: the way an object or image exists as a kigo, carrying accumulated associations within the saijiki and the tradition.
Hekigoto’s insight becomes especially interesting because it works on more than one level. The fly-swatter is not only a physical object; it is also a kigo. If its meaning is realized through use and encounter, then the same question may apply to kigo itself. A kigo does not live simply because it is recorded in a saijiki. Its accumulated meanings are activated and renewed through actual use in poems.
Hekigoto is not arguing that inherited meanings disappear. The fly is still a kigo, with all the resonance that tradition gives it. But those meanings are not a substitute for experience. The object, and by extension the kigo, must still become alive in the present encounter.
Your bikini example is actually a good one to think with. Before someone puts on a bikini, there is already a physical object, a category of clothing, and a set of cultural associations attached to it. But there’s also a difference between a bikini sitting in a drawer and a bikini becoming part of a lived experience on a summer beach. I’m not claiming the drawer-bikini doesn’t exist — of course it does, physically. The claim is that it exists in a different mode once it’s actually worn, actually salted by seawater and part of an afternoon. And that mode can shift again — if a wave carries it off and its owner suddenly finds herself standing on the beach without it, the object’s significance has changed again, even though nothing about its physical existence has. :)
Brilliant, beautiful essay, as all of these have been! So much here. Some of my questions/comments were addressed later in the essay.
*
“Seasonal meaning does not precede the experience; it emerges from it.”
Yet the experience is always-already embedded in a constructed “season” ?
*
“What remains after the philosophy has passed through the summer afternoon is not the literary summer but the season itself — stripped of its literary clothing, returned to its bare reality. Not the fly of tradition, tender and supplicant, but a fly. Not the summer of all summers, weighted with accumulated feeling, but this summer afternoon: specific, unrepeatable.”
Does this flatten out the impact of haiku? By stripping away the “literary clothing” that constructs a “vertical axis” it strips away some friction, moving the work toward the frictionless (banal) realm of ordinary speech/utterance. (You do answer this question later in the essay, but it remains a live concern in haiku situated in our current world)
*
“The kigo lives in the eternal present of seasonal recurrence, connecting this summer to all summers, this fly to the accumulated tradition of summer flies. But the accomplished past interrupts that continuity. The fly-swatter did not exist and then it did: a singular, unrepeatable event.”
Kigos and their dynamic with hon’i link, but also shift, i.e. change. They are not static, granted the shift takes place over long durations of time, i.e. not caught in the rat-race of go go go go go.
*
“…the two kigo together making a summer scene, a lived seasonal world rather than a literary one, the classical associations of the fly giving way to the functional object that will define itself through use.”
Does this pragmatic functionalism touch a little too closely with the depersonalized functionalism of capitalism? Something Dimitar Anakiev writes about in his essay ‘Haiku and Capitalism.’ I wonder if too muchūshinron, combined with the stripping of literary clothing and streamlined functionality reduces the ability to experience beauty (c.f. https://accesson.kr/jceasia/assets/pdf/48051/journal-12-2-35.pdf) and thus to dismantle any concern for constructing it and protecting it.
*
“What Hekigoto registered in a summer room with a dead fly was not merely a philosophical observation about fly-swatters. It was a shift in the emphasis of our way of being in time — one that haiku, if it remained faithful to the present, could no longer refuse to acknowledge.”
Yes! This is a beautiful and necessary statement/sentiment for haiku to remain relevant….and yet the dangers of irony and the commodification/banal-ification of art and beauty into the ideologies of capitalism are a great gravitational pull in “living authentically” in the today’s moment. What is the balance between irony, curated personalities, contemporary subjectivity, surveillance ethics, and “authenticity”? And of course that balance will have to be worked out via art, at same time that art is being appropriated into said ideologies. What Hekigoto was doing, but at an ever accelerating pace, go go go go.
Maybe the revolution is always slowness. The glacial hon’i-shift pace of the Issa’s snail up Mt Fuji.
*
“The fly-swatter did not exist and then it did.”
Yes, there is the moment of rupture, a rupture that reached into the the “literary clothes” closet to pull out and slip on a kigo (fly-swatter). The present moment in the process of rupturing into the present moment relied on a kigo to express the rupture.
*
In this essay you define “utterance” as that which “recreates an experience in the living present of reading.”
How do you conceive of “recreates” (re-creates) being opposed to or different from “represent” (re-present)?
*
Again, incredible essay. A powerful look at the dynamic between deep time and surface time, and how formal properties develop to deal with this dynamic to create “immediacy” as neither now, nor then, but an “immediacy” that is an experience transcending the markers of “now” and “then” (and what’s to come) and the linguist move we employ (e.g. tensed verbs) to generate “now” and “then” and “to come.”
Adam, thank you for these thoughtful questions. I think some of them may come from the fact that several of these statements are experiential rather than absolute claims. I am not suggesting that the literary axis, hon’i, or inherited resonance disappear. They remain part of the encounter. The question is what becomes central, and how meaning is activated.
With kidai, I don’t think Hekigoto is trying to strip away literary associations or prevent allusion. A reader cannot encounter a fly in haiku without thinking of the tradition around the fly, of Issa, and of all the accumulated meanings attached to it. The point is not the disappearance of hon’i but the removal of its centrality hence of its guarantee. In the same way that muchūshinron does not eliminate the elements of the poem but resists giving any one element a fixed centrality, the load-bearing forces are redistributed rather than removed.
I also think there is an important distinction between use and utility. Hekigoto’s poem is not moving toward a capitalist instrumentalization of the object and or the poem. Utility reduces something to what it is for; use is the encounter through which something becomes visible. The fly-swatter becomes meaningful through its function and beyond its function because that act of use reveals something about identity, realization, and becoming.
The object does not simply become a tool. It becomes a question.
The same applies to kigo. The claim is not that seasonal meaning exists outside history or culture; of course every encounter with a season is already shaped by tradition. The point is that the living force of a kigo is not exhausted by its inherited category. It emerges again in the encounter between the word, the world, and the reader.
So I would not see Hekigoto’s movement as flattening the vertical axis or removing beauty. It changes where the friction comes from. The resonance remains, but it is no longer automatically supplied. It must become alive again.
I’ll divide my answer into sections and stop here for now
I agree with all you write :) Hekigoto’s shine and movement is incredible and necessary and what artists of a form should be doing. Of late I been in a couple convos about HOW contemporary haiku should present so as to BE contemporary, to FEEL contemporary when experiencing it. The “spell” magic that Martin Lucas discusses in his foundational essay. How does contemporary haiku ride the wild edge of capitalism without falling into the capture apparatus suck of total-commodification and flattening of experience and the sickness of convenience; how does contemporary haiku retain its vertical depth (if ELH ever had vertical depth?) and literariness (friction) when interacting with a value system designed to assimilate every challenge to it, everything Other to it?
fake news for spacious skies
have it your way
my precious
I think artists like Hekigoto, dealing with Modernity (and Post- and Meta-) move close to the beast in their solutions/experiments of producing immediacy. They mimic (as did my amateur attempt above) in some ways the flows and linguist markers of capitalism (its utility and functionalism, its non-centrality, and de-centered essence, its sloganism, its eternal Now, etc.) (Google Ngram shows the term “entropy” sky rocketing after 1900). There is danger of being fully pulled into the jaws of the “system” when mirroring its foundations and gestures, or of the system shifting to the philosophies of the Other to generate its value (e.g. the revolutions of post-modernism becoming the philosophic backbone of late-stage cap).
Hekigoto is not pulled in, but he moves close and there is a buzz to the danger of the pull, of being close to the beast, and the feel of “immediacy” that comes with being so close to the beast.
There is something important in your image of moving close to the beast. To speak about the beast from a safe distance is one thing; to enter its maw is another. Hekigoto’s achievement, I think, lies precisely in that willingness to enter the conditions of modernity rather than simply defend haiku against them from outside.
But entering the maw is not the same as being consumed by it. The challenge for the artist is to move close enough to understand the forces at work, while maintaining enough distance to transform them into something else.
I agree that is perhaps why Hekigoto’s experiment feels so alive. He does not reject modernity’s loss of guarantees; he explores what kind of immediacy and meaning are possible after those guarantees have weakened. The danger is real, but so is the creative possibility.
I would go further and say that haiku may be becoming more, not less, relevant to our times. Its “format” already captures something profoundly modern. But unlike the fragment as dispersal, haiku places the fragment within a field of relation. Its ancientness offers not an escape from the fragmented present, but another way of inhabiting it.
Haiku knows how to hold brevity and depth together without allowing one to dissolve the other. It can acknowledge the instability of the present moment while still creating resonance, connection, and continuity. That may be exactly what this moment needs.
I’d like to raise again for discussion, and other people’s views, some questions that got lost in the vast number of comments last week.
“When we call something a poem, we are not only identifying a set of formal characteristics”
…I am wondering what would be the formal characteristics identifying a poem/not poem, a haiku/not haiku? (in English). Specifics would be more useful than generalities, I think. But the pitfalls are evident.
“we are encountering this arrangement of language as something to be dwelt with, listened to, and explored.”
….as with, say, the Zoom presentation I listened to on how astrobiologists would determine whether there is life on other planets. Not by itself sufficient to determine if a text is artistic literature, I suggest. It needs more; just as it needs more than identifying formal characteristics (if those can be agreed upon). And so we get to:
WCW’s poem (the plums) that was cited: agreed. It produces a visceral response beyond being a plain communication, by an arrangement of words with shared associations. Perhaps we need that visceral element too for our haiku-is-poetry diagnostics kit?
It may be that as soon as we step away from writing haiku in Japanese with Japanese aesthetics and a long cultural tradition of its own, we are no longer entitled to call it “haiku”. That could solve a lot of problems. To the extent we make it our own, altering the genome, we’re weakening the link with that legacy.
Another question is why it should matter to us that we are writing “haiku?” What’s in that name that is so special for us?
That last question is for me a very interesting one. Is it important to us that what we write should in some way ‘qualify’ as haiku? If so, why? Do the reasons lead us to any crucial identifying particulars (not “rules,” note)?
Keith, just saw your post here, which makes me hesitate to post something I just wrote, as it may distract or contribute to the scatteredness that is inevitable in conversations like these, but I seem to be overcoming my hesitation only because what I want to say touches on something you hint at, I think, which is what makes an “arrangement of language . . . something to be dwelt with, listened to, and explored” rather than a mere well-written statement. Art beyond skill. But I hope to consider your more specific questions, and I hope others will as well. The question implied in my following post is– despite everything, haiku endures– why?
*******
Interesting, the similar complaints that come down about haiku in the last hundred years and more. (And probably the last 400 years). Hekigoto complaining about “the very accumulation of conventions that had made haiku recognizable and teachable and reproducible. What had flourished had begun to rot at its edges.”
This is not very different than Takeo Kuwabara, in 1946, saying that haiku was not an art but a kind of skill. (Reproduction requires skill, not art.)
And of course, now that ELH has had many years of “accumulation”, there are many complaints from different corners about much the same thing.
And yet it must be said, as a tribute to haiku, that despite the weight of tradition, and despite its clear limits (the very things that contribute to the potential for stagnation) it endures. Endures like rock whose lichen may eventually split it open.
Perhaps even, into something that needn’t be called “haiku”.
In aside, although it is easy to pick holes in Kuwabara’s method that led to “A Second Class Art” one has a sneaky suspicion that his results are likely to be right.
Last week I wrote a fictional comment in Runyonesque form where a professor of literature tries to convince bit-players in the NYC underworld that Issa’s “little snail slowly slowly climb Mount Fuji!” is a great poem. (I used to frequent Runyon’s bar on E 50th. Tha barman story is true. A crane fell on it and wrecked the place a few years after I left. It reopened somewhere else).
I have also met with blank but gentle silence when I have tried to ‘explain’ haiku as poetry to my highly educated and literate friends over lunch. After brief enquiry they look at me sympathetically, and move on to talk of other things.
Part of the problem, both with the Kuwabara exercise and these other instances, may be that to appreciate a haiku, a person needs a fair amount of skill and knowledge as a haiku reader?
It’s a mystery as to why some people take so readily to haiku and others just don’t. For me it definitely was not a matter of skill development or knowledge. I think it may have had something to do with the brevity– with words moving so quickly into image. And image back to words.
Keith, I would agree with those that suggest on “needs a fair amount of skill and knowledge as a haiku reader.”
I think haiku like Peter Newton’s,
beam by beam
the old barn taken
down to sky
are fairly easy to “get,” but the uninitiated might not “get” it at any truly interesting level beyond the ability to conjure an image.
But haiku more like Robert Grenier’s
except the swing bumped by the dog in passing
or Richard Gilbert’s
a drowning man
pulled into violet worlds
grasping hydrangea
or Fay Aoyagi’s
tadpoles with legs—
I assure him there’s no need
to leave his wife
These need a little more “skill and knowledge” at reading haiku.
Yes. As Peter notes, it may not need prior haiku-related skill, knowledge, “the knack” or other prep to be hooked by the simple and good ones. Most of us probably had that initial thrill untutored. But study does improve appreciation (witness these essays on Hekigotō’s verse) and helps in decoding some of the more arcane or experimental verses.
Glad you flagged up Robert Grenier’s
except the swing bumped by the dog in passing
Not written as haiku, his Sentences, but that particular one’s among my favourite examples, seasonless or not. I also like
M
IS FOR
MAHONEY
….when we get round to hidden ‘cuts’ :-)
PS there’s a line in Ted Hughes’ “Thrushes” that comes to mind in the context of haiku:
“Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
For years: his act worships itself “
Keith and Peter, I think this question connects back to the discussion with John about Hekigoto’s fly-swatter. There are many kinds of existence, and the question is not simply whether something exists, but in what sense it exists.
Haiku’s existence can be approached from both ends: is haiku an essence recognized by readers, or is it an intentional participation in a tradition? I think some version of both is necessary, and they correspond to different modes of existence.
Take Jules Renard’s poem, published in 1896:
Le Ver Luisant
Cette goutte de lune dans l’herbe !
in English
The Glow Worm
This moondrop in the grass!
The poem is often cited as the first French haiku, or at least as one of the earliest French poems to anticipate the form. Yet there is no evidence that Renard set out to write a haiku, and the poem predates the development of haiku as a conscious literary practice in French.
Many readers immediately recognize something haiku-like in it. Even if we knew nothing about its history, we could plausibly read it as a haiku.
But what changes if we do?
If we read it as a haiku, its brevity becomes almost invisible because brevity is already expected. Haiku are short. The poem fulfills an expectation of the form.
If we do not read it as a haiku, however, its brevity suddenly becomes meaningful in a different way. The poem could have been ten lines long, twenty lines long, or a page long. Instead, Renard chose a single line. The extreme compression begins to feel expressive in itself. The tiny form mirrors the tiny glow worm. The brevity becomes metaphorical. We are no longer simply reading a short poem; we are reading a poem whose very smallness participates in its meaning.
Neither reading is wrong. Each reveals something. But they are not identical readings.
This is why I hesitate to reduce the question of haiku to either authorial intention or reader recognition alone. Readers clearly can experience haiku outside the boundaries of the tradition. At the same time, the frame through which a poem is presented affects what becomes visible to us and what recedes into the background.
Intention matters especially in formal poetry because forms are not merely collections of characteristics. They are traditions. A sonnet is not simply fourteen lines. It is fourteen lines understood in relation to other sonnets. Likewise, a haiku exists within a field of expectations, histories, and possibilities.
So my answer to Keith’s question is actually quite simple: we call a poem haiku because that is what we set out to do. Intention alone is not sufficient, but neither is resemblance. A poem becomes haiku through a relationship between what the poet is attempting, what the reader recognizes, and the tradition within which that encounter takes place.
In that sense, the question is not entirely different from Hekigoto’s. The issue is not simply whether something exists, but how it comes into being as the thing it is.
When we no longer conceive our poems as being in dialogue with Issa, Bashō, Buson, Chiyo-ni, and the tradition they represent—when their influence has become too distant to exert a gravitational pull on what we write—perhaps English-language haiku will eventually change its name. That is certainly possible, and perhaps even inevitable over a long enough span of time.
But I do not think we are there yet.
For all the transformations the form has undergone, and for all the debates about what haiku is or should be, we still write in conversation with those poets. We still measure ourselves against them, argue with them, learn from them, reinterpret them, and return to them. The dialogue remains alive, and as long as it does, the name continues to describe something real.
For all that I am in no way inclined to believe in spirits, I keep coming back to some elusive quantity that seems “the spirit of haiku.” I’m not the first, nor the last. I think we get an inkling of it when first a haiku hits us with that shivery feeling which for Emily Dickinson was “the only way” she knew poetry. And then we develop it with every haiku we read or write that has any impact on us. It must be as infuriating for rational philosophers as for scientists or atheists such as I. It is that which is transferable to other languages.
I leave you with the words of that great haiku spirit Marcus Aurelius:
““We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.
“Or how ripe figs begin to burst.
“And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty.
“Stalks of wheat bending under their own weight. The furrowed brow of the lion. Flecks of foam on the boar’s mouth.
“And other things. If you look at them in isolation there’s nothing beautiful about them, and yet by supplementing nature they enrich it and draw us in. And anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure. Even what seems inadvertent. He’ll find the jaws of live animals as beautiful as painted ones or sculptures. He’ll look calmly at the distinct beauty of old age in men, women, and at the loveliness of children. And other things like that will call out to him constantly—things unnoticed by others. Things seen only by those at home with Nature and its works.”
“Give yourself a gift: the present moment.”
Meditations Book 3 tr. Hays; #3.2 and (the last sentence) Book 8 #8.44
Ahem, we’ll have to add “and the past moment(s)”
…and yet Emperor Marcus predates “haiku” or “hokku” or “haikai” by well over a thousand years.
Marcus Aurelius the haijin. 😂
I think there is something worth pinning down in “the spirit of haiku,” rather than leaving it as something irreducibly mysterious.
What we call haiku’s essence or spirit is not a thing sitting outside or above the tradition, waiting to be intuitively grasped. It is the conception that forms in a reader after sustained engagement with haiku — a kind of residue or distillate of reading. And that conception cannot be fixed or singular, because every poet encounters a different selection of the tradition, weighted differently, and notices different qualities within it.
Your spirit of haiku and mine will not be identical, because they are formed through different encounters.
But that does not make the idea arbitrary or purely subjective. Whatever conception emerges remains answerable to something real: the body of poems that constitutes the tradition. We cannot derive just any “spirit” from Bashō, Issa, Buson, Shiki, and the countless poets who follow them. The corpus constrains what interpretations are plausible, even if it does not dictate a single conclusion.
So the spirit of haiku is neither an objective essence existing independently “out there,” nor a private feeling with no foundation. It is a kind of convergence: individually variable, but shaped and limited by a shared and finite body of actual poems.
Fittingly, “spirit” and “essence” are both words connected etymologically to what remains after distillation — what is left when a larger, messier substance is reduced to something concentrated and potent. That is exactly the sense in which I mean them: not as a mystical substance floating free of the tradition, but as what remains after a reader has passed through enough of it.
And I think this is why Peter’s comment last week rings true: ultimately, each of us has to discover what haiku means for ourselves. But that discovery does not happen in isolation. It happens through a continuing conversation with the poems that came before us.
Yes, I can go along with that.
I wouldn’t try to pin down the “essence” (well, maybe I would, but I’d fail — moonlight in a fishing net). But that essence is what transfers between languages and across cultures, I venture.
Sometimes I think of other tastes in a similar way. The more one samples wine (or as you might say, has a conversation with it) the more one’s tastes develop. Same for music. Not everyone ends up with the same favourites, but the general direction seems fairly common.
Marcus is pretty good, eh?
I love his comment “you shouldn’t be surprised that a fig tree produces figs.” So much for postmodernism… And presidential re-elections.
Yes, I think the wine analogy is a good one.
Taste is something that gets formed over time. Someone who has only ever drunk full-bodied wines might dislike a Pinot Noir on first encounter. That does not necessarily tell us anything about the quality of the wine; it may simply reveal the limits of the drinker’s palate at that moment.
I think reading traditions works in much the same way. We should be wary of dismissing too quickly what we are unused to. Someone who has only read one school, one period, or one aesthetic tendency may mistake a part of the tradition for the whole.
That is one reason I hesitate to pin down the spirit of haiku too narrowly. Haiku is broader, stranger, and more internally diverse than any one of our initial impressions of it.
The spirit of haiku might not only be what we distill from the poems we have read; but also the willingness to keep reading beyond our preferences and allow that distillate to change.
Marcus Aurelius is right that we should not be surprised when a fig tree produces figs. But the fig tree itself is not a static given. The figs we know and value are the result of centuries of cultivation and selection. Nature and cultivation are not opposites. The same is true of tradition: haiku has an inherited nature, but that nature has always been shaped by poets who questioned, selected, transformed, and renewed it.
Perhaps we can still hope about the next elections :)
I love your closing paragraphs. And it highlights the importance of the efforts of yourself and others who bring the names of other historically important haiku writers (like Hekigoto) into the fold of the dialog. I mentioned Ōgiwara Seisensui in a haiku chat room recently, and it was like “Who?”
“When we call something a poem, we are not only identifying a set of formal characteristics.”
I would argue we call haiku haiku because of both its (1) formal characteristics, (2) its perceived purpose as a genre, and the (3) sensed possibility and limits of experimenting upon both of these. A haiku is not a newspaper article about a new species of spiders, because of these three items.
Whether a haiku (constituted by these three items) is a good haiku, imo, depends on how much friction is present in the linguist presence of the work (either written or oral).
Adam,
I would find it helpful if you would show us a few examples of haiku which use “friction” as you see it.
Hi Peter, I commented on a post in the Fly Part 1 thread, but when I hit Post, I didn’t have internet (Spectrum sux) at the moment and the comment went away, but the tl;dr of it all: I dig what you were saying.
Some examples in ELH, since I don’t want to have to deal with translation issues:
strawberry moon
trading heads
with Medusa
(Mike Andrelczyk)
dandelion
immigration status
unknown
(Julie Ann Espinoza)
would his eyes have been blue Christmas
(P M F Johnson)
Outside of the formal qualities associated with haiku, there are the allusive and symbolic components that add friction to the work. Also , in the latter two, the contemporary political and identity (culture war) issues add friction.
Adam, I like your term “sensed possibility.” Pocketed.
I’ll answer this in several parts for clarity.
I think there are several different questions here that are worth separating. “What is poetry?” is famously difficult to answer. It also contains at least two questions: what makes something literature rather than ordinary communication, and what distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature, especially prose. Then there is the further question: what makes a particular kind of poetry haiku?
The first question for me is partly one of framing and mode of attention. Found poetry and conceptual poetry make this especially clear: ordinary language can become a literary object when it is placed within a different frame and encountered differently. This does not mean that every text automatically becomes a successful poem, but it does show that literary status is not located only in the material itself. As with art more broadly, the frame changes the kind of attention we bring to the object.
The WCW plum poem I already used as example illustrates this well. The same information could be conveyed as an ordinary message, but the poem creates a different encounter. What matters is not simply what is said but how it is said—the arrangement, pacing, sound, rhythm, and materiality of language itself.
My own way of thinking about the distinction between prose and poetry is therefore not as a hard boundary but as a spectrum. The more language draws attention to its own material qualities—the more we attend to sound, structure, repetition, ambiguity, arrangement and texture—the more it moves toward the poetic. Prose can of course become highly poetic, and poetry can approach ordinary speech, but the distinction lies in the mode of linguistic attention.
This is why I think the astrobiology example is different. A scientific presentation may be fascinating because of what it tells us. Literature asks us to attend not only to what is said but to the language through which it is said. The arrangement itself becomes part of the experience.
I’ll leave haiku specifically for my next comment. :)
” Literature asks us to attend not only to what is said but to the language through which it is said. The arrangement itself becomes part of the experience. ” – Orense
The arrangement itself, yes., for better or worse.
This morning’s ‘sketch from life’. (L.F.)
mid-winter —
in my bathroom the buzz
of a dying fly
It wouldn’t work at all as a one-liner, in my opinion.
While shaseing in this hemisphere:
morning shave
a dandelion puffball
drifts past the mirror
Smiles. :) Clever :-) It might be a real dandelion puffball, or it might be a bunch of hair that looks like a dandelion puffball, but recently was grey-white hair shaven from someone’s chin.
A real one, Lorin, drifting in through the open quarterlight and across the mirror while I shaved. It was actually last summer. I had a feeling it might have significance, but wasn’t sure how, so it’s been sitting in my notes until now. I see transience, fruitfulness, seediness, and maybe in the calm drifting, untroubled ease; all coming between me and the mirror…
Each one of us has a cultural tradition, and each culture has its own legacy. My vote is that we westerners should write, not imitation Japanese haiku, but haiku that grow from each of our own experiences and cultural foundations while remaining true to the spirit of haiku. Which, luckily, you our current hosts are right now helping us to understand better.
Do we perceive a point where decay outweighs growth, when getting rid of things becomes more urgent than accumulating them?
Is a fly aware of its impending death?
And are we aware of it?
Thank you, Urszula. Very perceptive questions, and I think the poem contains all of them.
I also think the fly may matter to the poem in more than one way, embodying the stakes of its central question in a way that your own questions make clear. It reminds us that every realization has a cost. Something comes into being, and something passes away.
So many questions, and then you have to learn to live with the answers.
I’ve really enjoyed this examination of Hekigoto’s attempt to retain a present vitality by including the past, and the philosophical questions addressed as Japan was thrust into modernity. I am definitely in the school of modern and experimental haiku, and it’s good to have such a thorough argument at the hip. Thank you Orense!
I found interesting this translation by Gabi Greve which changes slightly the angle of philosophy:
“My translation of the haiku, which seems pure shasei (sketching from reality) in this context, would thus be:
until I hit that fly,
this was not
a fly-swatter
Thus it would not be a problem of philosophical existence, but simply one of using and naming things as life proceeds on hot summer days ….”
Thank you, Petro. I’m glad you enjoyed the reading, and thank you for bringing Gabi Greve’s translation into the discussion.I address Greve’s reading briefly in Part I. What I find interesting is that both readings are available in the original Japanese. They are really two sides of the same coin: the same problem approached from two different angles.
The emphasis is slightly different—more philosophical and ontological in Ueda’s reading, more functional and pragmatic in Greve’s—but the underlying question remains the same. Whether the object finds its category or the category finds its object, the implications are remarkably similar: what brings something into being as the thing it is?
I also think Hekigoto’s haiku, although well known, is often treated more as a fascinating curiosity than as a major poetic statement.
The ordinary act of swatting a fly becomes a way of asking what allows anything—a tool, a kigo, a haiku—to become fully alive.
I think it doesn’t get the credit it deserves :)
As far as I can see, the word “this” is introduced by Gabi, I guess to make the translation fit conventions about the present. There is a word for “this,” これ (kore) — this thing / this, or if modifying a noun, この kono — this (noun) near me, which isn’t in the text. It does affect the reading, just as Ueda’s choice of “did not exist” over “was no” nudges a reader towards an existential, philosophical reading. As I understand it…
Yes, both translators make choices that foreground different dimensions of the original. I personally prefer Ueda’s rendering because I think it captures more of the poem’s revolutionary aspect. His choice of “exist” may also be supported by the fact that nakarishi is a literary formulation that can carry more force and resonance than “was no” does in English.
That said, Gabi Greve is not wrong in foregrounding the ordinary dimension of the original. I think the poem’s strength lies precisely in the fact that it carries the possibility of both translations. The everyday reflection and the philosophical one are not really separate; the ordinary act is what opens onto the deeper question.
Yes. I prefer “until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter” as while it is true to the text, without Greve’s addition, and permits the existential/philosophical reading, it also preserves the ‘immediate’ everyday meaning and invites the present: “but there is now.”
Although if the fly-swatter “did not exist,” “it does now.” Slightly less natural, less conversationally fluent.
In the end, to the extent that there is usually ample scope in haiku, it’s a matter of the reader’s personal preference.
As Shiki noted, “the true charm of haiku lies in the fact that it … must await each person’s own realization”